When I first started my custom furniture business, I didn’t have much of a marketing plan, just a passion for building furniture and creating things with my hands. As I built my business, one of the things I did to promote it was to create a website to show off my creations. www.benhamdesignconcepts.com.
I read all kinds of marketing information about how to promote a website and how to get your website to be listed on top of page 1 of the search results in Google. Most of the advice I read, I found to be more damaging to my efforts than to be helpful.
One suggestion that I thought was worth a try was to write a blog. So I did. The hardest hurdle was finding topics to write about. How do you make a blog about furniture interesting so people will want to read it? Building furniture is not exactly a sexy occupation by any stretch of the imagination, at least not unless you are interested in woodworking. I follow other woodworkers’ blogs because I’m interested in woodworking, and others follow me likewise. In this regard, the blog was working to bring traffic to my website, just the wrong type of traffic. My fellow woodworker is not going to buy a piece of furniture from me; they are just going to build it for themselves. What I needed was to write a blog about furniture in a way that would interest potential buyers. To this day, I have not figured out this aspect.
My blog fell by the wayside; I rarely updated it and ended up deleting many of my posts because I spent too much time deleting comment spam.
One day a customer emailed me, asking me if I would send some pictures of how I would cut the mortise and tenon joints for her project. Her request inspired me to get back to blogging. I decided to use the blog on my website to talk about what goes on in my shop and on my workbench. Now if a customer is interested in any aspect of their project, they can follow along as I build. It also serves as a database for when I build something similar. I can look back and see how I did that aspect before.
My workbench blog still does not quite represent what I want it to, and it is still not as strong as I wish it were. However, I have discovered that I enjoy writing, and I’m becoming more confident in my writing as I develop this skill. I still have trouble coming up with topics to write about. Therefore, I decided to write about some of the other passions in my life, to tell my stories about how I became a furniture maker, and to continue to develop my writing skills.
I have had two major careers in my life, construction and sales. Ironically, my sales carrier focused on selling construction materials. I grew up in the construction industry, and I have always enjoyed building things. I find great satisfaction, at the end of the day, to be able to step back and see what I have accomplished with my own hands. It is that sense of accomplishment that has kept me interested in working with my hands and my joy of building furniture. Here you can find out the back story on how I became a custom furniture maker, or if you are interested in seeing my portfolio of custom furniture.